After a decade, lives still affected

The bullet traveled a quarter-mile. It struck 1st Lt. Bobby Woods just above his left eye, shattering bone and spilling blood.

Wrapping a bandage around his head, Woods called for his radio transmission officer. He yelled orders into the mic, positioning soldiers to attack the Afghan gunmen who’d ambushed them.

Woods’ troops, attached to the 101st Airborne Division, managed to repel the enemy during that Aug. 7, 2010, encounter, but several suffered injuries. None was hurt as badly as their lieutenant, bloodied but still in command.

The fact that he was in Afghanistan, a gunman’s target, had its roots in a decision he’d made 10 years earlier.

Back then, he was a horrified 16-year-old high school student, watching the marathon television coverage of the crumbling World Trade Center towers, the battered Pentagon, the tattered remains of a airplane in rural Pennsylvania.

When he graduated from high school in 2004, he enrolled at the University of Georgia, in his parents’ home state. In his junior year, Woods joined the university Reserve Officer Training Corps, graduating in 2008 as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He became one of the Army’s elite, a Ranger, and deployed to Afghanistan last spring.

Six months later, in the stifling heat of August, a wounded Woods struggled to stay conscious as the troops routed the Afghan gunmen. A sergeant helped support him as he directed medics to look after the guys injured in the midday fire fight.

“I wanted to make sure I did as much as I could to make sure others weren’t hurt,” he said.

Woods accompanied his patrol back to base, but remembers little after that. When he awoke at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., two weeks had passed.

Woods is a captain now at Fort Campbell, Ky., where he’s undergoing the latest of several rounds of physical and mental rehabilitation exercises for the wound he suffered a year ago.

But he’s no victim.

He’s undergone a barrage of operations to restore his face and to remove bullet fragments from his brain. In one, physicians temporarily removed a small piece of skull from behind his left ear to relieve pressure on his swollen brain, placing the bone in his stomach to keep it clean and nourished. In another, doctors inserted titanium above his left eye socket to replace bullet-shattered bone.

With intensive training, Woods learned to talk again, learned to control his arms and legs again. He adapted to seeing out of just his right eye; the bullet destroyed the left eye’s optic nerve.

Word got around about the young lieutenant who wouldn’t let a bullet stop him. On Aug. 22, the Georgia Legislature passed a resolution proclaiming Woods the “Man of Steel” for his “fortitude, bravery and courage” under fire.

The term sort of embarrasses him.

“I was just doing my best to keep everything together,” he said.

Woods will remain at Fort Campbell until next year. He wants to get a master’s degree in business to accompany his undergraduate degrees in criminal justice and psychology.

He also knows his life would have taken a different turn if not for the attacks 10 years ago.

Woods is the son of a brigadier general. As a teen, he’d become tired of the travel associated with military life as the Woods family moved from one base to the next. But the attacks changed that. He would follow in his father’s footsteps, even if they led to a bullet.

“I didn’t think about the military until then,” said Woods.

Today, said Wood, he’ll remember the boy who vowed to fight. He won’t indulge in self-doubt.

“You can’t go back and second-guess yourself,” said Woods. “I don’t regret serving in the war, or getting injured.”

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A victim’s family: ‘You can’t give up on life’

He’s been dead 10 years, but Adam White’s spirit is not. His friends and family keep it alive with trips to Katmandu, Mount Everest, the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. For years, those who knew and loved White have been scattering handfuls of his cremains at the world’s wild and lovely places.

Adam White, 26, an employee of the banking and investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, was in the north tower of the World Trade Center 10 years ago today.

He and more than 2,700 others in the trade center’s twin towers died in the smoke and flame.

The attacks extinguished a life that burned brightly. Adam White was an adventurer, as restless as the oceans he liked to visit. He had plans to go to Brazil in mid-September 2001. His hikes up windy summits gave his parents fits.

He was active in charitable causes. He was mature for his age.

“His career was on such a trajectory,” said his father, Shelby White, 65, a mortgage banker and broker.

“Women loved him,” said stepmother Georgia White, 63. “Everyone liked Adam.”

After 9/11, the Whites divorced, ending more than two decades of marriage. Adam’s death, they agree, played a part in that: The shared grief was just too much.

Unlike so many divorced couples, the Whites never truly separated. They stayed in touch, bound by years together, by memories that a divorce judge’s decree cannot dissolve. She moved away, but not too far.

And always, they thought of Adam.

Shelby White took a sabbatical from work in 2006. He began exercising, bought a bike and became reacquainted with the joy of physical exertion. He lost 80 pounds, too.

He enjoyed the outings so much that he bought his ex-wife a bike. They began pedaling the Silver Comet Trail, the defunct train track that runs from Smyrna into Alabama. She lost 20 pounds.

They gained something in those trips, too. They talked about the lost son: What would he be doing now? Would he have a wife?

These days, said Shelby White, he tries to live life as his son did — freely, and with daily doses of joy.

“I’m thankful for the days I’ve got,” he said. “Adam was a real good one for enjoying the day. I’m trying to do that more.”

Georgia White is trying to adopt the same attitude. Some days, she succeeds.

“You have to go to work,” said Georgia White, who manages a Buckhead condominium complex. “You can’t give up on life.”

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A New Yorker: ‘I felt like I was in another country’

She was a New York girl, through and through. The longest period Nirvana Edwards ever spent away from her Queens home was four years as an undergraduate at a Pennsylvania college.

When she graduated, Edwards returned to New York and got a job at the headquarters of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization based in lower Manhattan. Not far away stood two giants, the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

She wasn’t at her desk when they toppled. Edwards was home sick and didn’t return to work for several days after the attacks. When she did, something felt wrong.

“There were all these soldiers on the street, carrying big guns,” said Edwards. “I felt like I was in another country.”

Months passed, but that feeling didn’t go away. The whoop of a police siren, the howl of a passing fire engine: The sounds reminded her of broken buildings and people leaping to their deaths.

In 2008, Edwards finally decided to make a change.

She relocated to Atlanta, where an aunt and several cousins lived.

Here, Edwards, 34, is a saleswoman and freelance writer. “I like it here,” she said. “It’s calm.”

On a recent visit to New York, Edwards extolled Atlanta’s virtues to family members, but they were skeptical.

“They said to me, ‘When are you coming home?’” Edwards recalled. “I said, ‘I am home.’”

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A resident: ‘Muslims are like anybody else’

The caller’s voice was hard, filled with hate, when Amjad Taufique played the message on the answering machine at the Masjid Al-Hedaya.

Taufique does not recall exactly what the caller said, but the message was clear: This is your fault! Muslims are glad we were attacked!

“The cursing!” said Taufique, who was president of the Marietta mosque’s board of directors 10 years ago. “He cursed us over and over for three minutes or more.”

Taufique erased the message, then recorded a new greeting: “We, as Muslim-Americans, are also hurt by what happened,” the message began.

The next day, he returned to the mosque and checked the answering machine. Taufique heard a voice he recognized. He remembers that second message.

“I called to curse you again,” said the caller. “But after hearing your message, I changed my mind. I’m sorry.”

At that moment, said Taufique, he knew: Not enough people understood Islam, the religion he’d followed all his life. He decided to change that.

A few weeks later, at Taufique’s urging, the mosque held an open house. So many people visited that mosque members directed overflow parking to a nearby shopping center.

When his family moved to their current home near Kennesaw Mountain, Taufique held another open house. He mailed invitations to more than 120 households; people from about 65 showed up. The Taufique residence, a classic brick two-story on a leafy cul de sac, echoed with laughter.

“Muslims are like anybody else,” said Taufique, 52, a native of Pakistan who came to the United States in 1980. “They go to work. They come home. They have issues with their teenagers.”

Because of the events 10 years ago, Taufique seizes every chance to tell others about his faith. He is an ambassador for Islam.

“I find myself in conversations with people,” said Taufique. “And I’ll say, ‘Let me tell you what Islam is all about.’”

He’d especially like to share that message with the anonymous caller from 10 years ago.

“I’d like to meet him, sit down and talk,” said Taufique. “We could get to know each other, maybe do something good for our community.”

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An emergency responder: ‘ I need here.’

On Sept. 12, 2001, Larry Causby drove to Atlantis, the sprawling resort close to his home in Nassau in the Bahamas. The images of the previous day’s attacks were vivid in his memory.

“I think I had to be near my countrymen” on vacation at the resort, said Causby. “I felt so far from home.”

Home was Georgia, and, for the first time since the Cartersville native moved to the Caribbean nation in 1997, he missed it.

The azure ocean was nice, the palm trees lovely, but he wanted red dirt and magnolias. He also wanted to help his nation any way he could — and that meant heading back to the United States.

Two days after the attacks, he turned in his notice as director of the private ambulance service that had hired him four years earlier.

Three months to the day after the attacks, Causby carried all he had left from his island life — three suitcases — and boarded a Delta flight to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

A veteran emergency medical services specialist, he had no job, but soon found work on ambulances serving Grady Memorial Hospital. At the urging of a colleague, he began helping teach emergency medical techniques to others.

In 2007, he became Cobb County’s EMS training services coordinator. Working out of a cramped office in west Cobb, Causby helps oversee the training of fire and rescue specialists in Cobb and surrounding counties.

In quiet moments, Causby, 45, thinks about the Bahamas. He remembers palm fronds clattering in the wind, the smell of fruit in the open market.

If not for the attacks, “I’d still be in Nassau, no doubt about it,” said Causby.

But 9/11 convinced him that his heart remained in Georgia. “I don’t think, ‘I’m needed here,’” said Causby. “I think, ‘I need here.’”